E47: Facebook's week from hell, Ellen Pao on sexism in Elizabeth Holmes coverage, Newsom's win, frauds & more

Show Notes: 0:00 Besties intro, TPB Symposium recap, rapid generations in tech 7:00 UBI, incentives for success, social safety nets 19:45 Newsom's recall victory in California, where the GOP went wrong 33:59 Facebook's week from hell, Instagram's harmful impact on teen girls 42:42 How to properly regulate social media's impact on certain groups 1:04:46 Pentagon admits to killing 10 Afghan civilians (including seven children) in drone strike 1:07:17 Ellen Pao on sexism around the Elizabeth Holmes trial; Juicero, JUUL, and other male-led failures/frauds 1:25:54 Mailchimp sells for $12B, employees got no equity 1:29:43 AOC at the Met Gala Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect Links: https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-02-16/as-social-media-time-rises-so-does-teen-girls-suicide-risk https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/09/15/stolen-election-myth-gop-511988 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739 https://www.publichealthlawcenter.org/topics/commercial-tobacco-control/commercial-tobacco-control-litigation/master-settlement-agreement https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1438597853320908811 https://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Slide1.png https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-19/silicon-valley-s-400-juicer-may-be-feeling-the-squeeze https://scorpioncapital.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/reports/BLI.pdf https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-176 https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2021-164 https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-ends-virtual-currency-trading-platform-bitfinexs-illegal https://coingeek.com/tether-banned-on-canada-first-2-licensed-digital-currency-exchanges/ https://investors.intuit.com/news/news-details/2021/Intuit-to-Acquire-Mailchimp/default.aspx https://twitter.com/stoolpresidente/status/1437585404010582016 https://shop.ocasiocortez.com/collections/all/collections_-tax-the-rich?sort_by=manual https://www.bestiesapparel.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Where were you on Thursday? Were you up here or in LA?

• 0:03David Sacks?

  I was at home. I got, I got family to do.

• 0:07David Friedberg?

  Oh, family? Have you, you met them? What were they like?

• 0:13David Friedberg?

  Are they everything you expected?

• 0:15David Sacks?

  I had to meet, I had to meet the new kid.

• 0:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's 19.

• 0:19David Friedberg?

  What's his major?

• 0:40Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the All In Podcast. Yes, we made it to episode 47 in three episodes. It'll be episode 50. No plans to do anything other than just try to record this every week for you, the loyal audience with us again. Coming off an amazing event, a live event on Monday, Tuesday, and I don't know if it went into Wednesday, but David Friedberg's the production board event. We recorded our first live All In. It seems like it went well on an AV basis and the audience seemed to enjoy it. What was the feedback? Friedberg?

• 1:14David Friedberg?

  So, you know, half of the room were scientists and they'd never heard of this podcast before. And they were like, what the hell did we just show up to? It's like, who are these four guys on stage drinking this wine, talking about politics for an hour and a half? But-

• 1:27David Sacks?

  And dropping F bombs.

• 1:29David Friedberg?

  And dropping F bombs. And there was a little bit of kind of seasoning we had to do afterwards to get everyone kind of comfortable. But no, actually, it was fantastic. People loved it. You guys were the highlight. And I thought it was super fun to do that in person. I don't know what you guys thought.

• 1:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's cool energy. It's super cool energy.

• 1:45David Friedberg?

  It was great.

• 1:46Jason Calacanis?

  And with us again, of course, David Sacks, the Rain Man himself, and the dictator, Chamath Palihapitiya. What did you think, Sacks, of the live event format? Obviously, half the audience were fans of the show, half weren't. Which is better than putting people randomly into it. But I'm glad that the people who are not fans of, or have never heard of the show, didn't walk out. We didn't have walkouts, so that was good.

• 2:13David Sacks?

  Yeah, I mean, look, we were slightly more palatable to them than Andrew Dice Clay or something like that. But uh.

• 2:20Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:23Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, I'm on the production board. No, I gotta run for you.

• 2:28David Sacks?

  It was, it was a good change.

• 2:29Jason Calacanis?

  Dick or a dick or a duck. The production board. About to start it.

• 2:34Speaker 04

  Jack and Jill were knocked on.

• 2:36Jason Calacanis?

  I smell something. You think Sam's farted?

• 2:43David Sacks?

  It was a good change of pace. I mean, I think some people commented that the lighting, the production values weren't that great. They seemed fine to us at the time, but uh, so we're gonna have to do better on that next time. And other people speculated that we took, we were easier on each other in terms of debating topics because we were in person. I didn't feel that while sitting there, but you guys tell me if you think that was true.

• 3:05David Friedberg?

  I thought, I thought we got a better read on each other in person and we had more dialogue than we normally would over Zoom. I don't know if you guys felt the same.

• 3:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I, I, I, I think so. And then I, I kind of liked the evening podcast, the glass of wine. I think there's something about it, like you're just like a little.

• 3:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you're coming in for a landing. Yeah, coming in for a nice evening, the panel of cards after. It could be a thing. It could definitely.

• 3:27David Sacks?

  I could, I could definitely make Harland 2012 a, a regular part of taping this pod. The problem is we taped too early on a Friday, right? If we could change the taping to like happy hour or something like that, it might work better.

• 3:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh my God.

• 3:39Jason Calacanis?

  A Harland 2012, uh, what is, that's a good bottle of wine.

• 3:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh my God.

• 3:45David Sacks?

  Even J Cal knows that. Look at him pretending, pretending to be a man of the people.

• 3:48Jason Calacanis?

  That's the, it's the one with the round label. I know it. I know. I'm looking at it right now. Oh my Lord, some of those go up in value. Those things are, it looks like as high as.

• 3:58David Friedberg?

  Do you guys think we could do a pod where we like record after playing poker for two hours? So you're two hours into the wine and poker and then you record? Wouldn't work.

• 4:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No way. No way. It'd be two.

• 4:07Jason Calacanis?

  I think the wine, yes.

• 4:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Poker, no.

• 4:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I think for a first time, the audio was great. So that's, you know, job one is to get the audio rate to 99%. Consumption happens that way.

• 4:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I like the line of light in Friedberg's face.

• 4:21Jason Calacanis?

  That was great. The comments for all commenting.

• 4:24David Friedberg?

  You know, it was my wife who actually got up and fixed that like no one else of the crew. You know, the dozens of people working there did anything about it. My wife stood up and fixed the curtain.

• 4:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Dude, without Al, you would be nowhere.

• 4:35David Friedberg?

  Be nowhere in life.

• 4:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  She's, she's a great person.

• 4:37David Sacks?

  What was the empty seat about between me and Chamath? I mean, there was an.

• 4:41Jason Calacanis?

  That was if we wanted to bring up a guest. So.

• 4:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Unfortunately, all the people's names that were written on that piece of paper are quote unquote besties did not show up on time.

• 4:49David Friedberg?

  Yeah, right. Exactly.

• 4:50Jason Calacanis?

  No Bill girl. It was Bill girl. Sky Dayton didn't come in.

• 4:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They all showed up at like nine o'clock.

• 4:55David Sacks?

  Yeah, there may be a reason for that.

• 4:57Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I heard that actually was the back channel. There was Sky Dayton. The back channel was Sky Dayton and somebody else waited outside because they knew they might get pulled up. I got that from, I got that.

• 5:06David Sacks?

  You're gonna have to beep his name out.

• 5:08David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's your first time saying his name on the.

• 5:10Jason Calacanis?

  Sky Dayton. I can say Sky Dayton.

• 5:11David Sacks?

  No, he's not going to want his name mentioned on this pod. Are you kidding me?

• 5:14Jason Calacanis?

  He's been on my pod. He's been on This Week in Starbuck. He's one of the first 10 guests. That was the last press appearance he did was 11 years ago. He literally does not, I mean, everybody knows who Sky Dayton is. Earthlink founder, Boingo founder.

• 5:25David Sacks?

  Everybody of our generation, but it's amazing how, you know, quickly the tech, the tech crowd, you know, moves on.

• 5:33David Friedberg?

  So true.

• 5:33David Sacks?

  There's a, there's a famous story, actually, when, when Marc Andreessen met Marc Zuckerberg for the first time. Zuckerberg didn't know that, you know, Andreessen had created Netscape. I'm not even sure he knew what Netscape was.

• 5:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think he said something like, I created Mosaic. And he's like, what's that?

• 5:49David Sacks?

  Oh, right, right. Yeah, yeah. So it's like, yeah, look, in the tech industry, we're all concerned about the future. No one pays a lot of attention to history.

• 5:57David Friedberg?

  Do you guys feel like last generations entrepreneurs and investors at this point?

• 6:04David Sacks?

  Well, some of us are still currently creating things free bird.

• 6:12David Sacks?

  I can't mention the name of the app as per our anti-promotion rules, but I have recently launched a new product.

• 6:20David Friedberg?

  You could download my app.

• 6:25David Friedberg?

  But there's not, there's not, there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of kind of long careers in Silicon Valley, right? A lot of people kind of have, because you know.

• 6:31Jason Calacanis?

  A creating products?

• 6:33David Friedberg?

  Well, you have a kind of, if you have asymmetric success, right? You have these kind of like big bursts and then, you know, it's a, it's a different kind of life. You don't go kind of push again for the next hard entrepreneurial project typically, not everyone, obviously. And then you end up seeing like a generation kind of die out like, you know, web 1.0 and web 2.0 and then, you know, you don't see them again.

• 6:52Jason Calacanis?

  You also see an adventure, right?

• 6:54David Friedberg?

  Eighty percent of them. I mean, it's an adventure, yeah.

• 6:56David Sacks?

  I think, I think there's a lot of truth to that, that, and I worry about this with my own kids, that I think deprivation creates motivation, especially to do something as hard as create a company, create a startup.

• 7:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Deprivation creates motivation.

• 7:11Jason Calacanis?

  Welcome to David Sacks's infomercial.

• 7:14David Sacks?

  No, no, I mean, look, I think, you know.

• 7:16Jason Calacanis?

  Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

• 7:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That leads to fornication.

• 7:22David Sacks?

  You know, beep, beep.

• 7:23Jason Calacanis?

  Beep. Our friend beep.

• 7:27David Sacks?

  Has a, has a saying that, that sort of became famous when Elon then repeated it, which is that creating a startup is like staring into the abyss and eating glass. And it is really hard to create these companies when they're successful. And so not a lot of people want to do it again, once they've reached that point. And, you know, it does take a certain amount of, like I said, deprivation, you know, to do this stuff.

• 7:48Jason Calacanis?

  I totally agree.

• 7:49David Sacks?

  Which is why giving everybody the participation trophy and trying to make people's lives as easy as possible. I mean, yes, you want, you, you don't want to deprive people on the one hand, but on the other hand, it does often lead to, to good things.

• 8:03David Friedberg?

  Totally agree.

• 8:04Jason Calacanis?

  We're seeing a bit of a dry run of this. If people believe that, you know, they have UBI or the government's going to take care of them. I would be fine with UBI, you know, everybody getting a little bit of money. And if it was a safety net, the only thing I worry about is it seems like a little bit of money, if you're clever, means you could never work. And then what happens to those people in society, right? Like,

• 8:26David Sacks?

  Well, I just, I think it's anti compassionate because what you do is you kick out the, the bottom rungs of the ladder of economic success when you basically pay able bodied people not to work. I mean, they need, those entry level jobs that may not pay much better than the UBI are an important stepping stone to where they get to next in their career. And I think it's, it's demotivating and we've already seen in California.

• 8:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  UBI, UBI is not going to pay you to go to college, but Amazon will, as an example. So you're absolutely right. There's a, the, the GI Bill, you know, there's all kinds of examples where in history we've used, you know, entry level jobs is exactly as they're meant to be, an entry level opportunity, an on-ramp to work your ass off and to make something of yourself. If you, if you all of a sudden let people opt out of it, then it's going to be a very, it's, what they're not going to realize is by the time they get old enough where they will want to have some kind of purpose, it'll be too late because then activating yourself in your 40s and 50s to essentially start your life is really hard. I'll give you an example of this, like, you know, right now I, you know, I would say I'm

• 9:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  like fairly fluent in Italian.

• 9:34Jason Calacanis?

  That's pretty impressive.

• 9:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I, but I started taking Italian lessons and, you know, the last four or five percent of a language is brutalizing, right? Because it's like, it's every little grammatical thing, you want to get it completely right. And it's very, um, demotivating for me sometimes because I'm like, God, why the fuck am I doing this? Um, I don't have to, I can get it by just speak it, but I've made a commitment to myself. Uh, same thing in biotech, you know, I got introduced to it by Friedberg and, and obviously Nat and, and now I'm trying to learn and it is a, it is a grind and I think it's so easy to quit. Now you take that to the extreme and some random person that doesn't have necessarily the ability to fall back on the success that, you know, we've all collectively had and

• 10:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  you have to start from scratch? My God, it's it's really tough. It's really tough. At our age, it is just hard. Kids are screaming in the background. You're trying to manage all this stuff. It's impossible. So.

• 10:31David Friedberg?

  You think it's easier when you're in your early twenties?

• 10:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, be careful what you wish for.

• 10:36David Friedberg?

  But why is it easier when you're in your early twenties? Isn't it always a grind to learn something and push yourself to develop yourself? I mean,

• 10:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, you have nothing. So the the theory is you have some motivation to get something, right?

• 10:47David Friedberg?

  But if you still have nothing.

• 10:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're gonna climb up the mountain because like staying at the shore means you can go watch out to sea or something. I spent hours and hours and hours working. Hours and hours and hours. In my twenties and thirties, like it was like ten to sixteen hour days.

• 11:01David Friedberg?

  I couldn't, I wouldn't leave the office. Is that different today?

• 11:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, I I don't work in the same way I did before because I I'm trying to do a different job. Um, but I've earned the right and I've now put myself under pressure to do it differently because I have a different job to do.

• 11:16David Sacks?

  Right.

• 11:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But when I was in my twenties and I was a PM, you know, grinding out a product or, you know, writing a feature spec or, you know, building a model and trying to put all these things together. Uh, it was so much thankless work. I learned a ton, uh, and it was all worth it. I was about to ask you, do you regret it or not?

• 11:35David Sacks?

  No, look, this is the thing about work. This is the thing about work, life balance that the people are always complaining about. People who are working too hard don't realize is that. Yeah, you you want to think about work, life balance, but but across your entire life. I mean, one of the things you'll do in your twenties is work much harder to set yourself up to where you want to be in your fifties. And so Chamath doesn't have to work as hard in his fifties because he worked much harder earlier in his life and now he's got the skill set where he can delegate more. Um, so I, yeah, I think we're, you know, we really shortchange people when we tell them as young people that they don't need to work hard. Or in the extreme case of UBI, that we're actually paying people not to work. Um, that's not developing the right habits that are going to make them successful later on.

• 12:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And in fairness, though, if you look at minimum wage and you look at entry level jobs, many of them paid too little historically. These companies like McDonald's, I know it's a free market, but we're paying very little. We're talking seventy, eight dollars an hour. And no benefits. And, you know, this is kind of unnecessary greed in my mind. And I think that's what we're seeing. My first job was at Burger King. I made four fifty five an hour.

• 12:38David Friedberg?

  Yeah, I made four dollars and twenty five cents an hour in nineteen ninety six. That was my first job cleaning cleaning a pool. Yeah.

• 12:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Two fifty for me when I worked at Fordham's.

• 12:48Jason Calacanis?

  Fordham's Computer Center, I think it was four, two, no, three, three dollars it had gone to. But when I started in the workforce in eighty-eight, it was two fifty was the minimum wage. What was the minimum wage where you were, David?

• 12:59David Friedberg?

  What was it like in that nineteenth century? It sucks.

• 13:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, tell us.

• 13:03David Sacks?

  When I, when I, when I was working at

• 13:05David Friedberg?

  When you tilled the fields.

• 13:06David Sacks?

  No, I, I remember when I was in college, I worked at a bar. Um, and, uh, I mean, I was there drinking so much, I finally was like, why don't you just give me a job? So I might as well make some money while, while I'm sitting here. And they paid me seven bucks an hour. That's why I did my senior year.

• 13:21David Friedberg?

  Whoa, pretty good, pretty good.

• 13:22Jason Calacanis?

  That's a pretty well-paying job, seven bucks.

• 13:25David Friedberg?

  One of the other problems, but one of the other problems with UBI that Larry Summers has been, he's the former U.S. Secretary of Treasury, he's been on the record about, um, is the inflationary effect. So, you know, there are pretty smart economists like himself who kind of highlight that as you give people, everyone, you know, ten thousand dollars a year, first of all, it's going to cost ten trillion dollars, or whatever the estimate is, to kind of fund that sort of program. Um, and, you know, suddenly the cost of a burger goes from forty-nine cents to ninety-nine cents, or ninety-nine cents to a dollar ninety-nine, because there's, uh, you know, much greater demand on that kind of area of the economy, uh, for consumption. And so you see an inflationary effect, which trickles its way through. And so what ends up happening ultimately is by pumping more of that money in for free, without productivity coming out of it, you effectively see inflation.

• 14:11David Friedberg?

  And so it wipes itself out. Um, and so this is kind of one economic theory on UBI is that it can actually just end up being within ten years, completely useless and pointless, because then the basic cost of living climbs so much that you need to raise the UBI again to give people basic living expenses. Um, and so it becomes this kind of nasty runaway effect. So it's not really sustainable, is one argument that's made against UBI. But, you know, obviously a different point than what we were kind of saying a moment ago. Anyway.

• 14:41Jason Calacanis?

  I think people, I think people don't know what they want, and if they get it, they're going to.

• 14:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think, look, a form of UBI does make sense, and I do think we need to subsidize folks. But, you know, I think maybe it's probably just a fancier word for welfare. I grew up on welfare, and I can tell you that I don't think our family benefited from it. Psychologically, we benefited from it socio-economically because we needed it to not starve. But the knock-on effects of, you know, when you're in that loop of, again, being in your 30s, 40s, and 50s, not finding purpose, you know, which my parents had to struggle through, coping, you cope with alcohol, you cope with depression, the knock-on effects to your kids. I don't think we want to see that. And so when people think about UBI, I think they need to understand that, you know, we've run a long experiment in this thing called welfare.

• 15:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know what welfare does. A lot of us have felt it, and there needs to be a better way. Because if you just let people opt out, I don't think you really understand what happens over long durations of time when you're not doing anything.

• 15:44Jason Calacanis?

  It's getting really weird right now, right? I mean, the fact that restaurants are closing that have customers, but they can't operate. And so we're starting to actually see the effect of it, you know, in some service.

• 15:55David Friedberg?

  What's the open job stat right now? It's like 9 million open jobs in the US?

• 15:58Jason Calacanis?

  It's been bouncing from 8 to 10 million, yeah.

• 16:00David Sacks?

  There's more unfilled jobs than there are unemployed people, right?

• 16:04David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 16:05David Sacks?

  Or unemployment is high, but unfilled jobs is even higher.

• 16:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 16:11David Sacks?

  We've somehow moved away from a political consensus we had in the 1990s that I think made a lot of sense when Bill Clinton passed welfare reform with, you know, a lot of Republican support is, so look, we need to have a welfare system. We need to take care of people who either can't work or can't find a job for a good reason. There needs to be a social safety net. But if you're an able-bodied person who can find a job, you should be working. And that welfare reform they passed in the 90s did lead to a lot of people finding meaningful work, which I think resulted in happier lives. And somehow we've moved off that political consensus that everyone kind of agrees, yes, social safety net, but able-bodied people should work, to now we have this elite, it's

• 16:56David Sacks?

  really an elite ideology of UBI, which is, look, we're going to pay people not to work, which I just think is sort of like un-American.

• 17:04Jason Calacanis?

  Isn't it also like a little insulting being like, you know what? Don't even bother working. You're making too little money. We'll just give you money. It's, it's

• 17:11David Sacks?

  Yeah, it's like

• 17:13Jason Calacanis?

  dignity. I'll be honest, like I wouldn't want to take it. I would rather go out and be, I was a waiter or busboy. I'll go be a waiter or busboy and make enough money to pay my rent and

• 17:21David Sacks?

  Yeah, one of the things

• 17:22Jason Calacanis?

  I don't want it for free.

• 17:23David Sacks?

  Yeah, one of the things you hear is, well, your job's going to be replaced by a machine anyway. It's not productive work. So why don't we just pay you to sit back and, you know, take yourself out of the economy? Well, like you said, the unfilled jobs number shows that even with all the automation that's happening in the economy, and that's a trend that will continue, there's still a need for, you know, human labor. And I think there always will be. And, um, and it's a little bit too soon to be throwing in the towel on the idea that entire groups of people can't productively work.

• 17:56Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, does everybody believe able bodied people should work and not get free money?

• 18:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's not that it should or shouldn't. I think the question is what's, uh, what's in folks' best interests?

• 18:07Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that's what I mean. Yeah, but yeah. So is it in best people's best interest? I'll phrase it the way you're saying, is it in people's best interest?

• 18:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think the, I think the point where we're going to go wrong is when we couple UBI with, um, actually having to work or not work. And I don't think that's the right idea. I think we have to do a decent job of letting people find the things that they want to work on because everybody can find something that they want to work on. And that shouldn't exclude you or disqualify you from getting UBI. So that all that does is then just raise the general standard of living. I think that idea is better. The problem is when we talk about UBI, what we are talking about it is in the exact way, Jason, that you said, which is letting people opt out. So.

• 18:51Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, think about how privileged that is to, there are places in the world where there's not enough jobs. And people are like, wait a second, an American has to be fulfilled with their job selection? In addition to getting a job? It, that just seems like the height of entitlement. It's like, sometimes you just need a job because you need money to pay your bills, right? But you're saying if you get product, if you get job, job candidate, you know, citizen fit, you, the uptick will be better.

• 19:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  UBI is a benefit. It's like universal healthcare. We don't, we don't make a decision about universal healthcare based on who does or does not have a job. And so, uh, UBI should basically be about evening, you know, the bottom few rungs of economic viability so that everybody has a reasonable, um, ability to have a decent life. That's a nice idea. I think that makes a ton of sense. But coupling it to having to work or not work, where some people say, oh, great. I could take this money and not work is the wrong way to figure this out.

• 19:44David Sacks?

  We're talking politics. Why don't, why don't we shift to the, the, the recall?

• 19:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. All right. Uh, so, uh, Postmortem on the, uh, Newsome recall, he, uh, Secretary of State says the recall cost over 300 million, obviously. Um, Gavin Newsom won in a bit of a landslide.

• 20:03David Sacks?

  Hold on, the 300 million point. Let me just take care of this real quick. Okay. Because I saw this all day on social media. You know what? Yeah. It did cost $300 million, but all the people crying about that, clutching their pearls about the 300 million, never said a word about the 30 billion, the hundred times greater EDD fraud that was perpetrated by our state and by our one-party rule of the state. And the recall process and the ballot initiative process is the only check we have on elected leadership in a one-party state. So listen, I'll start clutching my pearls about the 300 million when they start, uh, talking about the 30 billion. But look, let, let's shift to, to the result of this.

• 20:42Jason Calacanis?

  What are you, wait, what are you referring to? I'm not sure I, I know enough about the 30 billion EDD fraud.

• 20:46David Sacks?

  This is the, this is the EDD fraud where 30 billion basically went to anyone claiming unemployment, uh, insurance and 30 billion in, in fake claims were paid out. The process was so poorly administered. So, I mean, people were just creating fake addresses. They were just sending in claims from anywhere and, um, and 30 billion went out. So, so look, I mean, that's the kind of incompetence and corruption that we have in California.

• 21:13David Friedberg?

  So, in fact, your point is that because it's a single-party state where the state, uh, where the Democrats have supermajority in the Assembly and obviously have the, the governorship, that the only mechanism for the minority, the Republican Party, is to kind of run recall?

• 21:27David Sacks?

  Not even, not the Republicans, just us as citizens. I mean, look, let, let's remember how the, um, how the recall and the ballot initiative, uh, came to be, uh, that process. It actually came from progressives early in the 20th century who said, "We need the people to have some direct democracy because special interests might usurp the, uh, the, the, the electoral process and, and get control of all these elected representatives." And frankly, that's exactly what's happened in the state of California. But the people who, you know, have that power are progressives and so they want to amend or abolish the, the recall process. But, so, so look, I think 300 million, once every 20 years, to put

• 22:08David Sacks?

  the fear of God into politicians is not, i- is money well spent, in my view, even if this particular recall wasn't close. There are much greater examples of waste, fraud, and abuse that the people complaining about this should be wanting to tackle. And I'll believe them about the 300 million when they complain about the 30 billion. But look, this was a, a total shellacking for supporters of the recall. And I, I do think that whenever you suffer a defeat, I think it's important for you to think about what went wrong, you know? And, and certainly as a supporter of the recall, I think it's worth doing a postmortem. Um, I think, you know, any political party, when it loses, needs to do some, some introspection and...

• 22:48David Friedberg?

  So what went wrong?

• 22:49David Sacks?

  Well, I think a couple of things. Okay, so if you, if you go back to the polls a month ago or so, it was a dead heat. We even had that shock poll that Newsom was down by 10. And then what happened? Well, the Republican Party basically consolidated their support around Larry Elder. Prior to that, you kind of had this amorphous blob of five different candidates who didn't have a lot of name recognition. They were pretty moderate. They were a hard target for, for Newsom to shoot at. Once the Republican Party consolidated around Elder, it provided a very, uh, convenient and rich target for, for, uh, Newsom to shoot at. And so you'd have to say that tactically, the Republican Party made a mistake there.

• 23:29David Sacks?

  Now, I understand why they did it. I mean, Elder is smart. He's charismatic. He appeals to that base, but he's not the moderate candidate that like a Schwarzenegger was, or that I, you know, Chamath, I wanted you to run. And so Faulkner was sort of that candidate. And so you kind of had a choice on the Republican side between a moderate candidate who wasn't very charismatic, which was Faulkner, and a very charismatic candidate who wasn't moderate. And it really played into Newsom's hands. And he was then able to nationalize the election in the wake of that. So he branded, I think somewhat unfairly, he branded Elder as a Trumper, and he ran against Trumpism. And even Biden came to California to denounce Elder as a Trump clone, which, look, there's a lot of things you may not

• 24:14David Sacks?

  like about Larry Elder. I don't think it's fair to call him a Trump clone, but that's what they did. And so they demonized him. And so if you look at the issues that Newsom ran on, they were all national issues. He was, you know, talking about what was happening in Texas with abortion. And he talked about COVID. We should come back to that one, because I think that is a state issue, too. We should talk about it. But he started talking about issues that were really more national issues. And so the recall moved away from the issues that had galvanized supporters in the poll just one polls just one month ago, which were homelessness, crime, schools, and school closures and lockdowns. And Newsom was able to very effectively change the subject.

• 24:56Jason Calacanis?

  Well, he got everybody back to school, right? If people didn't go back to school, could have been a different result.

• 25:02David Sacks?

  I think the recall was very helpful in that. I mean, if you remember.

• 25:05David Friedberg?

  Do you think policy has shifted because of the recall sacks at this point? And doesn't that ultimately kind of benefit the issues you were most kind of concerned about?

• 25:12David Sacks?

  Look, the 300 million was worth it just to get businesses open and just to send a message to the the education unions that they could not keep schools closed for another year. I, you know, if you look at when Newsom relaxed the lockdowns, it was at every step of the recall process, when when the recall finally got enough signatures to get put over the top, he all of a sudden started liberalizing the lockdowns. He knew they were very unpopular, and he gave up on that issue. And he got the education unions to stand down on the issue of school reopenings, I think because he was facing this recall. So, look, I think that the recall was worth it just for that. But

• 25:46David Friedberg?

  Do you think things could have been different if there was a fringe candidate like, I don't know, a Sri Lankan billionaire that was, you know, not kind of this hardened Republican that they could charge and target against?

• 25:58David Sacks?

  Yes, I blame Chamath for this. I think a candidate like Chamath could have won. Okay, a Democratic centrist, obviously I'm joking.

• 26:05Jason Calacanis?

  A Bloomberg.

• 26:06David Sacks?

  I don't blame you Chamath, I understand why you wouldn't want to run, but I'm saying a candidate like Chamath, which is who I supported, or a candidate like Schwarzenegger. Remember, Schwarzenegger, when he ran in the early 2000s, he was pro-choice and pro-gay marriage. At a time that gay marriage was not very popular. He was socially very liberal. You have to take those issues off the table because California is not going to vote for a pro-life candidate.

• 26:30Jason Calacanis?

  I think he was pro-gay marriage before the Clintons.

• 26:32David Sacks?

  Yes, he was very early on that. He was socially very liberal and very tolerant. And you gotta be in California.

• 26:39David Friedberg?

  In general, do you think the unions in California, you know, which is an issue that's been talked about a lot on this pod, have been weakened because of the recall and the voice that kind of rose up during this period of time? Or do you think that nothing's really changed kind of long-term?

• 26:53David Sacks?

  I think it's a long-term project to get the public to see that the education unions are like any special interest, which is that they will pursue their interest at the expense of the general interest and they have to be controlled, again, like any special interest. I think because teachers are rightfully very popular, people haven't realized what the union bosses are up to. I think that that has been exposed because of COVID and the school closures to a much, much greater degree, and I think that's a good thing.

• 27:25Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, if you look at the recalls happening locally too with Chesa Boudin and the San Francisco School Board, it seems like now the citizenship is saying, oh, we do have a recourse. It's called doing a recall and stating our opinion very strongly and then attempting to removing people. And yeah, I think that does change people's behavior. You can be sure Chesa Boudin is thinking about outcomes a little bit more now than he did previously.

• 27:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The implications of this recall, I think, are really important. And I think it plays out in who runs in two years when Newsom is up for reelection. And absolutely, it'll change who runs on the Democratic side in four years, assuming Newsom wins. You have to remember, there have been a massive degradation in the quality of life.

• 28:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The most populous state in America, which represents the fifth largest economy in the world, under one party control, right? So there is not a single law that cannot be passed. There's not a single program that cannot be implemented. There's not a single idea that can't be pursued. Yet, we have had an absolute decline in quality of life under that rubric. And so when people really come to terms with that, that's, I think, when there's a sea change. And I hope the sea change is not necessarily a Democrat or Republican thing. It's back to centrism. And I think it's checking special interests, exactly what Sacks says, and realizing that

• 28:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  just because you use a different name, like "union" or something else, you're still a special interest. And you need to actually be focused on the interests of the general public: our kids, the environment, water quality. And if you can't walk into a state where everybody up another ticket is on your same team and get shit done, it's a really tough report card.

• 29:18David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 29:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm just super uninspired by these guys. Like, where is their audacious plan for California? Has anybody stated, like, an audacious, like, here's what this state is possible?

• 29:28David Sacks?

  No, I mean, no.

• 29:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Here's what's possible: we could be the best economy with the greatest education system, and we can build a million units of housing.

• 29:36David Friedberg?

  Should that be the role of the state government? I mean, like, you know, should, or should the free market kind of be...

• 29:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, they're in competition. They are. They're in competition with Florida and Texas. They have to compete for business and citizens. And if it's not done at the state level, we're gonna have to rely on the federal level. And we know that that doesn't work, because we have 50 states that are increasingly more diverse every day. So the whole idea with the Constitution and the founding fathers was like, we have this incredible startup, but over time, I think we've decided that, you know, this startup is an umbrella organization of 50 other startups. It's a holding company. And there'll be these small, little, you know, rules and differences amongst these 50 states, and that'll allow us collectively to thrive.

• 30:16David Friedberg?

  So Sacks, you put out a tweet... Oh, sorry, go ahead.

• 30:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I just wanna... I think we wanna believe in that idea. Like, there is no savior. You know what I mean? There's no savior for 350 people. And there's barely a savior for the 60 million people in California. But it's not going to happen by just throwing your hands up in the air and expecting some president to come around because that's just too hard of a problem.

• 30:36Jason Calacanis?

  Each state has to act like the citizens and be, you know, just rugged individualists who are self sustaining. Uh, and resourceful and this state is not self sustaining, resourceful or ambitious. And it's falling behind Texas and Florida and other competitors.

• 30:52David Friedberg?

  So Zach, you put out a tweet saying often in Miami, are you? Are you in the active transition phase or where are you at?

• 31:00David Sacks?

  Well, I don't know. I mean, we'll see. I think the trend line in California is not good. I think what you've already seen in the days since the recall is that Gavin Newsom has now laid out the strategy for all progressives. Uh, in like even from San Francisco to anywhere in the country of how they're going to run. And what they're going to do is this, that no matter how bad things get in terms of crime, in terms of homelessness, in terms of quality of schools. In cities and states that they have complete control over, they're always going to campaign against Trump and Trumpism. And they're going to demonize and otherize whoever the candidate is on the other side. As a Trumpist, whether they are or not, that's going to be the playbook from now on. And this is where I think the attacks against Larry Elder were very unfair is before he even had a chance.

• 31:46David Sacks?

  To define what he was about, you had publications like the LA Times calling him the new face of white supremacy. I mean, it was, it was like unbelievable, but.

• 31:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Black Klansmen.

• 31:55David Sacks?

  Yeah, they basically tried to make him out to be a black, which, look, he is not. Okay. Larry Elder's a libertarian, maybe his politics are not in the mainstream in California, but he's not a black Klansman. But look, this is what the progressive playbook is going to be for the next two decades, which is to demonize. Anybody who stands up to them. As basically being a, a Trumpist and, um, and the irony of it will be. That they will have total control over, over the, the problems that people really care about. Crime, schools, homelessness and, um, and somehow, you know, that they, what, what Newsom proved is that you can whip people. Pull up into you can stir their their partisan political tribalism when you do that,

• 32:39David Sacks?

  right? That's why it's effective is he gets people to see blue and and he gets a free pass on these issues that just a month ago, people were very dissatisfied with. Now, I do think it's very, very important that our Republican Party not play into this. And there was a very good editorial. I think there's

• 32:57Jason Calacanis?

  You guys are about to say, how come the Republicans are still pursuing a Trumpian, you know,

• 33:02David Sacks?

  They're screwing up. They're screwing up.

• 33:04Jason Calacanis?

  Stupid.

• 33:04David Sacks?

  They are. They're

• 33:05Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, they're so dumb.

• 33:06David Sacks?

  They're it's a really stupid strategy. And there's two things they got to fix right away. Okay, so number one, Rich Lowry from Nashville View had a police a piece in Politico where he said that this election, the stolen election myth has become an albatross for Republicans. They have to get off that. I think it's ridiculous. That's gonna bring them down in 2022. And the other thing is this anti-vax stuff. I mean, you know, voters completely forgot about the way that Newsom locked down this state and then broke his own lockdowns. Why? Because he's pro-vax even to the point of vaccine mandates, whereas the Republicans were not. And frankly,

• 33:47David Sacks?

  I think, Chamath, your instincts on this were were right on, which is people, given a choice between vaccine mandates or an anti-vax position, they will take the the vax mandates.

• 33:58Jason Calacanis?

  Speaking of instincts, you want to go to the this week in Facebook's dumpster fire?

• 34:03David Sacks?

  Sure.

• 34:05Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. So I mean, where to begin? This all started on Tuesday.

• 34:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  2016 at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

• 34:16Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, well, we'll get to your victory lap in a moment. But just to queue up this past week, on Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook conducted in-depth research on the impacts of Instagram on children's mental health from 2018 to 2020. But they never made the research public, nor did they make it available to academics or lawmakers who requested it. You will remember that last year or earlier this year, Facebook started floating the idea of Instagram. Instagram for kids. So in addition to having this research, which they didn't share. And here is the slide from a presentation. It seems like the Wall Street Journal has somebody inside of Facebook giving them everything, literally.

• 34:56Jason Calacanis?

  But here is the quote from presentation slides from 2019, internal Facebook presentation slides. "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls. Teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression." "This reaction was unprompted and consistent across all groups, according to the Wall Street Journal." And Instagram obviously is a juggernaut, over a billion monthly active users, and over 40% of them are under the age of 22.

• 35:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is a really interesting issue because we are, this is probably the first example of a broad-based public policy, public health issue that tech has created, not necessarily amplified, right? Or exacerbated, but actually created, and now we're going to have to deal with this. Before I, I want to give you guys-

• 35:48Jason Calacanis?

  That issue is? Well, how would you define that issue?

• 35:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I think it is a public health issue if you have-

• 35:52Jason Calacanis?

  Mental illness in children.

• 35:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  ...a large percentage of a cohort of our population subject to mental health issues and eating disorders. That's not a good place to be, right? I don't think that's what we want as a healthy society, in a healthy society. Our daughters, and it's probably, by the way, it's probably not more than just our daughters, it's probably our sons and daughters that are going through these issues. The question is now about, you know, is it really a public health issue? If you know about it, what responsibility do you have to do something? And before I opine, I just want to give you guys a little bit of data and just get your reaction. I actually want to go back to what's called the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. And the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement was entered in November of 1998.

• 36:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Originally between the four largest US tobacco companies, Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, Brown and Williamson, and L'Oréal, okay? And the Attorney Generals of 46 states. And essentially, it was an agreement that basically said, okay, we're going to net all these Medicaid lawsuits together. We're going to hold these folks responsible for the downstream implications of the product that they've been selling our kids and our, you know, adults population without the proper disclosures, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What happened before this tobacco MSA and big tobacco, though, was there was about eight or 900 private claims that were filed from the mid 50s all the way to the mid 90s. David knows all this because he made a movie about this.

• 37:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The reason why I think this is interesting is that whether it happens in the United States or someplace else, when I read that article, my immediate thought went to the tobacco MSA. Because I was like, well, okay, there's a public health issue that may or may not have been covered up.

• 37:33Jason Calacanis?

  And a cover up. You know, it's definitely a cover up.

• 37:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It may or may not have been covered up. There could be criminal liability. There's probably civil liability. If you're, you know, a mother or father who's lost their kid to an eating disorder or to depression.

• 37:45Jason Calacanis?

  Suicide.

• 37:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Anxiety, bullying.

• 37:47Jason Calacanis?

  Suicide.

• 37:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I think like, I think the article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday was about like human trafficking. I mean, these are some

• 37:54Jason Calacanis?

  gnarly.

• 37:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  horribly complicated gnarly issues. To me, that's how I can edit the dots. So I just love to hear.

• 38:01Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, who's the Jeffrey Weigand in this case? I mean, this is literally the movie The Insider, like, somebody's leaking these documents out.

• 38:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There's a deep throat inside of Facebook.

• 38:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Well, yeah. And that's what the Brown and Williamson was really about, is that somebody had the studies from the 70s of when, correct me if I'm wrong, David, when the tobacco industry knew and did nothing and covered it up, and then they had the whistleblower. So do you feel this is exactly analogous, Sacks? Or how close to analogous? Are we taking too big of a jump here?

• 38:29David Sacks?

  Well, this, this idea that social media is as bad for you as cigarettes has been around for several years now. And I've always wondered whether that was a hyperbolic claim. I mean, can it really be the case that using Facebook is as bad for you as lighting something on fire and sucking its carbonized ash into your lungs? I mean, I just, you know, yes, I think there's like a kernel of truth here in terms of, yes, it does exacerbate body image issues, but I don't believe that Facebook. Or social media created those issues. I mean, these issues existed before. And what Facebook does is connect people in a more intense way than they were connected.

• 39:11David Sacks?

  And so it might intensify some of the social dynamics that already existed, but I don't know that it created them. And if you're going to blame Facebook for this, there's a lot of other places you could blame too. I mean, why don't we be, why don't we blame the Met Gala, you know, like, um, you know, look at all those beautiful people.

• 39:28Jason Calacanis?

  Well, we have had actually blame on the fashion industry for making unrealistic body types and the magazines and they self-regulate.

• 39:35David Sacks?

  My, my kids can't wear the full body stocking to school that Kim Kardashian wore to the Met Gala or whatever. I mean, and they're upset about that. So should we ban the Met Gala? Or, I mean, let's look at all advertising. I mean, all advertising just about focuses on unrealistically beautiful people. And what about TV and movies? I mean, Hollywood tends to cast people who are better looking or even the people reading the news off teleprompters. I mean, so this like body image and self-esteem issue is everywhere in our society. And I think what social media does, as it does in so many of these cases, is really just hold up a mirror to our society. And it's, it's not, and yes, there's a lot of bad stuff happening on social media, but that's because there's a lot of bad stuff happening in our society.

• 40:19Jason Calacanis?

  Well, let me, I, you know, here's one thing, David, the, I, there, there have been other industries that have influenced this, but I don't think that they were as pernicious and as frequent in their use of, as social media, you know, reading a fashion magazine or watching TV, like slightly different than an interactive version of that, that you might use for five hours a day, like TikTok or Instagram. And I just dropped in an, an image into, uh, the, the Zoom chat there about suicide rates in the United States. And this chart you'll see goes up to 2018. And right around 2006, when we were at 11%, uh, 11 suicides, I think, per 10,000, per 100,000, uh, you'll see from 2006.

• 40:58Jason Calacanis?

  To 2008, we go from, you know, 10 or 11, basically suicides per 100,000 Americans all the way up to 14, a 40% increase.

• 41:07David Sacks?

  But what's your evidence?

• 41:07Jason Calacanis?

  And that correlates directly with social media becoming part of what we're doing here.

• 41:11David Sacks?

  But what's your connection to what's hap- I mean, is that among teens? I mean, what is the?

• 41:15Jason Calacanis?

  This is overall suicide rates. So I just think social media and the anxiety it produces could be actually having it. I'm open minded to that.

• 41:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Can I clear up one thing, Sacks? I think that your argument would be reasonable if the first part of your argument made more sense, and to me, it doesn't. And when you don't think that smoking and looking at your screen for an hour a day are the same, let me just, from my perspective, explain to you why they are the same. Whether or not you're ingesting something into your lungs, or whether or not it's your eyes, at the end of the day, you're still activating physiological pathways. Okay, there are specific chemicals that are being created through smoking, specific chemicals that are created through how your brain and your mind is reacting. And all of these things, when you're bathed in these chemicals for long periods of time, have known deleterious consequences.

• 42:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Some manifest in tumors, which then result in cancer. You die, lung cancer, cigarettes. But what we're learning is some of these things result in long-term imbalances of these critical hormones and chemicals you need in your brain to stay healthy. And that results in anxiety, or the propensity to overeat, or the propensity to then throw stuff up. And so I would be careful about not assuming they're not physiologically the same. I actually think they're more similar than different at a core physiological level. It's just that we're not used to the fact that something that is equivalent to looking at a screen could actually do that to you.

• 42:42David Friedberg?

  I guess the question is, what's the threshold for regulatory intervention? If someone did this at the scale, let's say there was a social network that had 100,000 users, and people were actively using the social network every day, and having body issues, or whatever the, you know, the consequences-

• 43:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're gonna find out.

• 43:01David Friedberg?

  -claim might be.

• 43:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We're about to find out.

• 43:03David Friedberg?

  You know, are we going to end up creating kind of a regulatory frame across all of these things? And I think that this goes also to the point of scale because at the end of the day, if you end up starting a business and you're not successful, you don't really kind of find yourself in the sort of framing of, well, what are you doing wrong? All of the companies that scale, the assumption is they did something wrong in order to get to that scale. You know, roll off both the Saks's former colleague and obviously famed investor at now at Sequoia Capital, said that he always, he only invests in businesses that pursue one of the seven deadly sins, because those are ultimately the things that consumers kind of increment their consumption of. There has to be a seven deadly sin driver,

• 43:47David Friedberg?

  you know, underscoring the success of any business that sells to consumers. And if that is actually true, people aren't making kind of altruistic purchasing and consumption decisions. They're making decisions based on envy and based on greed and based on gluttony. And all of those drivers, we kind of, you know, are effectively, kind of related back to these physiological drivers. Right? And so like, yeah.

• 44:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, two things can be right. What you said can be right. But I think what also can be right is, are we really willing to bet that now there are not 50 individually ambitious, politically ambitious state AGs licking their chops, reading this stuff, wondering how many kids in their state may have suffered from an eating disorder or anxiety and blame it on one of these apps?

• 44:31David Friedberg?

  Of course they are.

• 44:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Are we convinced that not a single lawsuit will get filed? Are we convinced that there's not going to be any class action? And by the way, that's just the United States. What if somebody that's sitting around a, you know, around a table of politicians' desks in, you know, Germany, Belgium, France, Thailand, they're going to find their issue in this treasure trove of content that's being, you know, continuously drip fed out to the public?

• 44:56David Friedberg?

  I guess my point is that this is today's issue. And business success ultimately over time in consumer markets will always ultimately be driven by products that have at scale deleterious effects on the consumer market. And those deleterious effects will be a result of some sort of kind of addictive or negative kind of consequence that arises when folks use these things frequently. And the market figures out how to optimize the utilization of products to increase revenue, to increase profit, and that's what a free market does. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just pointing out that there isn't, in my opinion, something unique here. I mean, you know, Coca-Cola is the largest beverage company in the world. They sell 40 grams of sugar and 12 ounces of water. And everyone buys that and they feel great from that. And the sugar creates this addictive problem. Now, we've got an obesity epidemic.

• 45:40David Friedberg?

  I'm not blaming Coca-Cola, but that's the general trend in CPG over the last 50 years, increasing sugar, increasing salt.

• 45:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And then the consequences arise. The difference is that this is not sugar, which is a generic compound. This is, for example, no different than when Purdue Pharma started to make fentanyl. It's a really great drug. It has incredibly superior advantages. It's used for a lot of very important things. When that spilled over knowingly to a level of abuse, and I don't think it was a lot of abuse, but there was enough, that essentially was overlooked in the building of a business. It started with state AGs who stepped in. And then it basically ultimately drove a federal agreement, states' agreements, a master settlement agreement around fentanyl, and then Purdue essentially disgorging all the profits that they made.

• 46:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So you're right, free markets should act in however way they're going to act. But when those free market operators themselves are producing data that shows that, oh shit, hold on, something could be going wrong here. Then I do think that politicians will step in, regulators could step in. I mean, what's crazy here is, you know, the FDA could actually act. Like if the FDA is willing to act on Juul, what is the difference if the FDA says they feel like, let's just assume that somebody in the FDA says, we feel like we should have a responsibility to think about mental health and eating disorders.

• 47:03David Friedberg?

  But that's the slippery slope, right? What's the threshold, right? At what point do they say, no, we're not touching this? And at what point do they say, yes, we are touching this? Because at the end of the day, any successful consumer product will have some degree of deleterious effect.

• 47:15David Sacks?

  And this is why we have to have some perspective about it. So in preparation for the segment, I asked my 11 year old girl, daughter. I know, Jake, how you don't think I talk to my kids, but actually.

• 47:28Speaker 04

  I made no joke. I made no joke.

• 47:30Jason Calacanis?

  I was thinking of three or four fun things.

• 47:32Speaker 04

  Did she ask you if you were the FedEx guy?

• 47:34Jason Calacanis?

  She was like, who are you? Why are you in my room? Security.

• 47:41David Sacks?

  So the first thing she said is, who are you? And the second, and after I said, I'm your dad. And then the second thing she said is, the second thing she said is, I don't use Instagram. I'm like, okay, well, what do you use? She said TikTok. I'm like, well.

• 47:52Jason Calacanis?

  The worst.

• 47:53David Sacks?

  So I'm like, what do you, what do you use TikTok for? And she said, well, I watch dance videos. And I'm like, well, I've been reading press articles that say that the only thing on TikTok is sex and drugs. And that it's, you know, it's, it's bringing you into a vortex of that. And she said, I don't, I don't watch that. I watch dance videos. And then smart as a whip, she said, the only people who end up watching that are the ones who keep indicating, she didn't use the word preference, but she basically said that they keep getting that stuff because they like it and they keep getting fed more of what they're watching. So look, I think we have to have a sense of perspective about this. At the end of the day, products like Facebook and Instagram are ways for people to share content and consume content for people they follow.

• 48:35David Sacks?

  I mean, that's basically it. Now, is there a lot of bad shit on there? Yeah, because there's a lot of bad shit in the world. And should Facebook be trying to control this stuff? Absolutely. But I don't, at the end of the day, think it's, it's cigarettes.

• 48:50Jason Calacanis?

  If they banned kids from using TikTok and Instagram until they were 16 years old, would you be opposed to that? Because I don't let my kids use it and I have an 11 year old. I don't let her anywhere near.

• 49:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We have a complete moratorium on that.

• 49:02Jason Calacanis?

  No social media is our rule. I can't believe you let your kids use social media. I mean, I'm not passing judgment, but are you crazy?

• 49:07David Sacks?

  I mean, like, all they use it for is to watch dance videos, so.

• 49:11David Friedberg?

  But I think Sax's point is an interesting one, which is, you know, based on what your daughter said, that that is effectively what's Going on, it creates an acceleration of the natural evolution of these markets that historically may have taken, call it 50 years for everyone to want to watch. You know, MTV didn't emerge for 60 years until, you know, there was kind of radio and television broadcast signals. And then everyone said, you know what, I want to watch rockers dancing on stage and going nuts and whatever the kind of consumer demand was that eventually evolved there. What's happening in social media is within seconds, you make evolutionary votes on kind of what you want in a media cycle. And then all of a sudden, a few hours later, you're getting exactly what you want over and over again, and you can't say no.

• 49:50David Friedberg?

  And that's effectively what digital media generally, social media in particular has some nuances to it, but digital media generally has enabled. Is an acceleration of the natural consumption trend that we see with humans, which is they eventually want to go to one of the seven deadly sins. And that's what they kind of get stuck with.

• 50:06David Sacks?

  We've definitely talked about the danger of getting trapped in an information bubble and a feedback loop. And I do think that is a danger of these products, but so is cable news. I mean, you know, you look at Twitter, it's an outrage machine and people get trapped in a cycle and they only want to. They either follow people to get outraged by them or just because they want to kind of self indoctrinate themselves. But that is basically why people watch cable news as well. I mean, it is an outrage machine.

• 50:32David Friedberg?

  Your friend Tucker.

• 50:34David Sacks?

  Or Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. They're both feeding different variations of outrage. And so my point is, look, I don't think these problems are unique to social media. I think they pervade Hollywood and the entertainment industry and even the news industry. Maybe, look, maybe we should put warning labels on them. At the end of the day, we don't prohibit cigarettes. We have an assumption of risk argument. We put warning labels on them. Maybe we need warning labels on these Instagram influencers.

• 51:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You do more than that, right? You put it, you put it behind a counter and there's a strict prohibition on people under the age of 18 being able to use them. And when it looks like, you know, companies like Juul were trying to circumvent those things or make it appear more valuable. Basically to hook kids at a younger and younger age when they weren't capable of making those decisions, they were held liable. So.

• 51:25David Sacks?

  Okay. So there's a really interesting topic there, which is should people under the age of, say, 16 or 18 be prohibited from using these products?

• 51:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yes.

• 51:34Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent.

• 51:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hundred percent. Look, if you, if you think about the-

• 51:39David Sacks?

  Sixteen or eighteen, sixteen or eighteen.

• 51:41Jason Calacanis?

  Let's go, sixteen, a hundred percent, eighteen-

• 51:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sixteen, a hundred percent, and then there needs to be a way of opting out because I think sixteen year olds are quite sophisticated. But here's the thing, we are living longer and longer than ever. It is very likely that we're all going to generally live to our hundreds. It's not the end of the world for these kids to have to wait an extra two or three years until their literal physiology is a little bit better formed so that they have better antibodies to this shit. And I think that if we as a adult population aren't necessarily going to take responsibility for these kids, I think we're doing them a huge disservice. You don't let your kids run around wherever they want. You don't let them hold guns whenever they want. You don't let them do a whole bunch of things that they may think is okay, but you know, could have really bad consequences.

• 52:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so if you know that this stuff is happening, I think it's very different to look at a twenty-two-year-old and tell them what to do or not to do. That's not what we're debating. But what that data was about was about long-term systemic health issues to a large percentage of girls. That's really fucked up.

• 52:48Jason Calacanis?

  And a lot of the research that's come out, I dropped a couple of links in the chat, you know, I haven't read the studies, but they're starting to show a correlation between suicide rates and depression in young kids with social media, and it does skew towards females. The theory is females are more adept or more frequently in dynamic or complex social situations. In other words, cyberbullying type situations where people use the social media to just kind of bully each other.

• 53:17David Sacks?

  I mean, look, I think you guys have a real point with respect to ages thirteen to sixteen. Because I don't think you're allowed to use social media, or at least the terms used prohibited under age thirteen.

• 53:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We all know that's a joke. You and I have both had to build products that have to, you know, abide by COPPA laws and we always just kind of laugh at it because they're bullshit.

• 53:33David Sacks?

  Right, okay, fair enough, but what I'm saying is I think you guys have a real issue that needs to be explored around what's the usage for ages thirteen to sixteen. But look, what I worry about with these things is you're always playing whack-a-mole, right? I mean, you basically ban social media and all of a sudden, these kids, because they're very tech savvy, are going to find themselves on text groups and text chats and they'll be in Signal and you won't even be able to see what they're doing. I mean, at least on social media, you can see it.

• 53:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The whole point of that, though, that makes sense to me because I remember when I was growing up and we all wanted to smoke. It was a pain in the ass to get cigarettes, so most of us just said, "Wah, it's not worth it." But yeah, you're right. A handful of people found a way to get the cigarettes, to sneak behind the school to smoke them. That's fine, but that's very different than Juul walking into the middle of the lunchroom and passing out berry-flavored vape pens.

• 54:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 54:21David Sacks?

  Do they do that?

• 54:22Jason Calacanis?

  Peanut, wow.

• 54:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's what the FDA is saying.

• 54:25David Sacks?

  Well, that's crazy. Obviously, that shouldn't be allowed.

• 54:27Jason Calacanis?

  They created packaging. If you look at the packaging, they created packaging.

• 54:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Why do you have the moral outrage around Juul and berry-flavored vaping and not this?

• 54:32David Friedberg?

  Look, why do you care about Juul? Or why should we generally care about Juul and not care about soda companies making forty grams per twelve ounces of sugar, which is truly dangerous and damaging to the health?

• 54:44Jason Calacanis?

  Because we've been drinking soda for a long time and we've already accepted it.

• 54:47David Friedberg?

  So we've allowed ourselves to accept it. We smoked cigarettes for a long time and then we had this kind of, you know, tobacco moratorium that's now kind of you know, shut out smoking.

• 54:56Jason Calacanis?

  But Freiburg, if you said, if you said right now COVID is a disease of the old and the obese, you would be canceled. Like, somebody tried to say that recently, the guy from... No, no, but the point is you're talking about, like, people are very sensitive about this obesity thing and the second you say, like, "We need to monitor..."

• 55:17David Friedberg?

  They're calling diabetes. Forty percent of Americans with type 2 diabetes, whatever the status is, is a function of...

• 55:22Jason Calacanis?

  There's also personal freedom and do you want to drink a Coke Zero or a water or Coca-Cola?

• 55:27David Friedberg?

  And so if you have personal freedom, why should some regulator tell you what social media tool you should or should not use?

• 55:32Jason Calacanis?

  We're not debating that.

• 55:32David Friedberg?

  Right.

• 55:33Jason Calacanis?

  The cover-up is what we're talking about.

• 55:34David Sacks?

  If we're talking about minors, if we're talking about minors...

• 55:37Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What are you gonna do with a thirteen to sixteen-year-old?

• 55:39Jason Calacanis?

  What are you gonna do with the

• 55:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Eleven year old.

• 55:42David Sacks?

  That's the best part of your argument. That's the best part of your argument is when we're dealing with minors. I could, I could see the argument for more restrictions and, and potentially support them depending on what they are. I think that's something.

• 55:51Jason Calacanis?

  What about, what about minors not being able to drink soda? You have to be sixteen year old to drink soda. I mean, that's actually.

• 55:58David Friedberg?

  That's where most diabetes and obesity is rooted in this country.

• 56:01Jason Calacanis?

  I actually am open minded to that position, actually. I know it sounds crazy, but.

• 56:05David Sacks?

  No, I think that, that, that makes an equal amount of sense.

• 56:07Jason Calacanis?

  Coca-Cola makes no sense if we have a crazy obesity. If we can actually show that.

• 56:12David Sacks?

  So let's ask the question then. So let me, let me ask a, let me ask a second order question about this, which is Freeburger is right that drinking sodas for thirteen year olds has got to be as harmful or, or more than using Facebook. Okay. So why do we never hear about that? I would argue that there's something else going on here with this massive amount of attacks on social networking companies. There's a lot of people who hate social networking in the traditional legacy media because they've been disrupted by Facebook, by these social media companies. And so they're looking, they took their money and they're looking to publicize any article about the negative effects of these companies, which

• 56:50David Sacks?

  they're not threatened by Coca-Cola. So they're not going to publish those kinds of studies. So I just think that there's an argument that perhaps, I, I'm not saying you're wrong. I think there's absolutely truth in what you're saying. It's all a matter of degree though, and perspective. And I do think that the traditional media has an incentive to blow this out of proportion a little bit.

• 57:09Jason Calacanis?

  Because they have an agenda, is what you're saying.

• 57:11David Sacks?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I think people in power. Look, I think there's a positive thing about social networking. I mean, because we haven't said one positive thing about it. Okay. Social networking overall enables us to stay in touch with people we care about, friends, family, and allows us to receive information from people we want to follow. Okay. We never talk about those positives. I find it an incredibly convenient way to consume news. Okay. So we, we never talk about that, but, but here, but here's why is because. Social media is fundamentally a democratizing force, right? It enables people to coordinate in a much more democratized way than they ever had been able to before. I do think that is threatening to people in power and given the chance they would like to suppress it.

• 57:55David Sacks?

  Zuckerberg gave a speech a few years ago about social networks being the, I think called the fourth estate, with the third estate being the press. And in the same way that that there are people who want to empower, who want to censor the press, I do believe that there are people in power who want to censor social networks because they don't like the disruptive democratizing force that it represents. And there is a lot of positive to that in the world.

• 58:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're, I think you're mixing up a lot of things there. So, yeah, you're right. And I don't think any of us are saying cancel these companies and remove them from the internet. I think what we're saying is there are very specific ways in which certain features are built, that they are expressed in features that are now apparently, according to their own work and exploration, are linked to mental health issues. So I think the point is people should now decide whether, to your point, we should ignore it because the good vastly outweighs, you know, what's a third of girls? Who the fuck cares, right? I mean, they're chicks, so whatever. Uh, or you say, uh, actually, this is a really big problem, and so let's step up and fix it because somebody needs to protect these people.

• 59:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And when you're 16 or 17 or 18, do whatever you want, like we let people do today. You want to drink a Coca-Cola every day, get diabetes? You can do that. Nobody tries to stop you. Right? You want to smoke a pack of smokes a day? You can do that. Nobody stops you. But we do a lot of other things to try to help kids.

• 59:21David Sacks?

  I think, I think if we're only talking about ages, if we're talking about the minors, the kids, I think you and I can find agreement on this issue. I think, but, but I do think that the demonization of social media goes well beyond that. But look, I think you've got a great point with respect to the kids.

• 59:34Jason Calacanis?

  Do you guys believe, and this is a theory that's been growing, that TikTok, run by the Chinese government, is trying to reprogram ethics morals and doing psych, psych ops, basically? Psyops on our children?

• 59:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, Jay, there's something bigger than that. I mean, I think all of you guys probably upgraded to 14.8 iOS this week. I hope, if you haven't, and everybody listening, if you haven't, please go upgrade it. But, you know, the Israeli spy firm NSO had apparently created a, a zero-click exploit for the iPhone, where you could turn on the camera and the microphone and basically spy on folks. Completely unaware.

• 1:00:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you know, Jason and I were talking about this and, and, and I think Jason, you were the one that said, you're like, yeah, we've been living with that with TikTok for years. It's not as if, you know, NSO just licensed it randomly to the Saudi government. I mean, this tool has been available for a while. So to your point.

• 1:00:25Jason Calacanis?

  But do we think that the Chinese government, TikTok are trying to program our children to be more deviant and to create social unrest?

• 1:00:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And no.

• 1:00:35Jason Calacanis?

  You don't think that they're trying to steer them with the algorithm towards bad results because they're not letting their kids play video games?

• 1:00:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I think what Seth said is right.

• 1:00:42Jason Calacanis?

  Did you see the Wall Street Journal article that I just sent to you guys? Wall Street Journal article basically created a bunch of kids' accounts and then did searches or what started to go down a rabbit hole. And just with one keyword search, you know, these kids went into deep, you know, kink BDSM sort of result.

• 1:00:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is a, this is a pretty straightforward weighted tree algorithm. Okay. So like when you start on a branch of a tree and you keep clicking on those things, that's what you will get. This is no different than how Facebook's algorithm works, how Google's search algorithm works for you. Once you start behaving with clicks or swipes or likes, they use that as a feedback loop and they wait, basically weigh the next set of results. So David's daughter is right. If you click on sex, drugs and rock and roll, that's, it's not all you're going to get, but it's going to be a large percentage of what you get. Because the algorithm in a blunt way assumes that that's what you like.

• 1:01:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So I'm not sure that this is repeating anything that's so, you know, it's pretty obvious that that's how it should work if they want to have maximum utilization.

• 1:01:43Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you know, the thing that's slightly different about TikTok is, you know, in Facebook or Instagram, you build your feed and Twitter, and then it serves it up algorithmically. On TikTok, it uses the entire corpus. So if you do one search for a keyword, now it's not just a subset of what your friends posted in some ranked order. It's the entire corpus of like long tail. And so what they show in this TikTok is like how quickly a child who just types in one keyword can be, have their feed be 90% drug use. And, you know, sadomasochistic, whatever you're into, uh, sex, I don't know.

• 1:02:19David Sacks?

  If the if the content is obscene, then it should be taken down to begin with. Okay. And look, my takeaway from this conversation is that we need to do something different for kids. I don't know if it's a it's a it's a flat out prohibition or what. But but but yeah, but look, so so the TikTok algorithm thing, if you want to keep seeing more and more content related to something, fine, the algorithm is going to give you more and more of what you want as a consumer. But maybe for kids, there needs to be some guardrails around that. And we don't direct, we don't direct kids towards certain kinds of content around, you know, sex or drugs or violence.

• 1:02:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have to constantly remind parents, like YouTube, kids should not use YouTube because it goes really to crazy, dark places. And there's kids YouTube and kids YouTube, they add each and every video. Now you still get some of that consumption and boxing of things and your kids will ask you to buy a bunch of stuff, but you're not going to get straight up sex, violence, and, you know, everything else.

• 1:03:16David Friedberg?

  I'll tell you what does happen. My I put kids YouTube on my kids, my four year old's iPad. And then the other day, she said she saw some like scary horror thing on there and she couldn't sleep and she woke up in the middle of the night. Because, you know, if we're not doing our job as parents curating the content and curating what our kids are doing, and we're leaving it to this app, we're totally effed. And and that's what I realized I did. My laziness in like, just thinking like, oh, there was something she wanted to watch. I put the app on there and didn't pay attention for a few weeks. And all of a sudden, she had gone down the rabbit hole, found something scary.

• 1:03:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I use a, I don't know if you guys use this, but I use an app called Custodial. It's with a Q. Q U S T U D I O. And you can kind of like lock down all these devices. And then at the end of every week, it gives you an email of all the app usage and all the links that these that my kids clicked on, or just my oldest one, he's the only one that has a phone.

• 1:04:09Jason Calacanis?

  But that's nice. And you had a discussion with them about that? Like, hey, yeah, and the rules to have this and yeah, it's gonna tell me what you do.

• 1:04:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I agree. It's still super, super hard. But this is why I think you need to have some blunt force instruments right now. And my blunt force instruments are you're not allowed to have. Well, the ones that we've we they're not allowed to have TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.

• 1:04:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, hard now.

• 1:04:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And the only reason we allow YouTube is because a lot of the school links are the videos inside of YouTube. And so you can't lock it down. But that's why I use this custodial app to see what they're watching on YouTube. Even then, though, it's not perfect.

• 1:04:46David Sacks?

  By the way, this thing that just came from the Pentagon is a total Friday news drop. I mean, talk about a Friday news drop.

• 1:04:52Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know what we don't know what you're talking about.

• 1:04:53David Sacks?

  US military acknowledges Kabul drone strike killed 10 civilians, including seven children. We knew this. They're just confirming something that had been exposed. The New York Times did excellent reporting on this.

• 1:05:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Excellent reporting by the New York Times. That was incredible journalism. I mean, did you guys see that? They were like watching frame for frame of like a video. Then they were like going to Google Maps. They were comparing colors of cars. They were looking at sides of buildings. Incredible reporting by the New York Times.

• 1:05:21David Sacks?

  It was really the I mean, it's obviously a tragedy. It was the final debacle of our Afghanistan involvement. This was a foreign aid worker who actually he was there as an aid worker. And they had him on video loading up his car with plastic jugs of water. And somehow they thought these were explosives or something like that. And he was doing his errands. And then he comes home, and they hit the the car with, you know, a massive missile from one of these Reaper drones. And it kills him as well as, you know, it's basically 10 members of his standard family, including seven children. Now, the I mean,

• 1:06:02David Sacks?

  I think I understand why this well, we don't exactly know why this happened. And I think it needs to be investigated. Obviously, the military in Kabul was on high alert because we had just had that bombing at the airport. And it was the bloodiest day for America in Afghanistan. I think we had 13 soldiers killed a few days before this. But But it just shows the kind of mistakes that we can make even fighting drone warfare. You know, the idea was that-

• 1:06:29Jason Calacanis?

  The term casualties of war exists for a reason. Like, this is how war works. You cannot do it perfectly. It's messy. Everybody, innocent people dies is why war is the worst thing in the world.

• 1:06:39David Sacks?

  But how did we ever-

• 1:06:39Jason Calacanis?

  It should be the last resort.

• 1:06:40David Sacks?

  Right. And how did we ever think we're gonna win hearts and minds in this country by, you know, like, we made too many mistakes.

• 1:06:47Jason Calacanis?

  Like, they're not interested in democracy, like, in the way we want them to be and the West wants them to be. We- By the way, that's fine. And us forcing it down their throats is not gonna work. We could have maintained a base there. There were better ways to exit, but- Let's fix the schools in California first. Yeah. I think that's, I think that'll, ultimately, I think people are gonna forget those images of people on planes and just think, "Thank God, that's over." I think now that there hasn't been 20, you know, and hopefully there's not another 9/11. All right, uh, let's wrap with, um, Ellen Powell wrote a piece for the New York Times, uh, op-ed section, section on sexism in tech, using the Elizabeth Holmes trial as, uh, the main example.

• 1:07:29Jason Calacanis?

  Um, she was also on Tech Check, CNBC show, and discussed her op-ed, uh, quote, "Holmes should be held accountable for her actions as chief executive of Theranos, and it can be sexist to hold her accountable for alleged very serious wrongdoing and not hold an array of men accountable for reports of wrongdoing and bad judgment." She uses Travis Kalanick and Adam Newman as examples of men who have engaged in questionable, unethical, even dangerous behavior in tech without much legal penalty, and that they both went on to start new companies. Her main example, however, of bias is tech executive Kevin Burns, who is the former

• 1:08:11Jason Calacanis?

  CEO of Juul, J-U-U-L, uh, who helped the e-cigarette vaping company raise, uh, $12 billion, but he left Juul amidst, uh, a lot of legal blowback and just this past week-

• 1:08:24David Friedberg?

  With a bunch of, with a bunch of cash.

• 1:08:26Jason Calacanis?

  With a bu- yeah, I mean, of course, you get the, you secure the bag on the way out, Adam Newman too. Um, and, uh, yeah- Don't drop the bag. Don't drop the bag. You have one job to do. Don't drop the bag. Yes. Run, um, but don't, do not drop the bag.

• 1:08:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So

• 1:08:41David Friedberg?

  I mean, she mentioned other stories like Juicero. If you guys remember this company, a couple of years ago, they raised a hundred million dollars pre-launch, right? It was a juicer that, you know, was supposed to juice vegetables.

• 1:08:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I enjoyed my juice from my Juicero.

• 1:08:55David Friedberg?

  Yeah, but the claim that they made was that inside of the packets was like fresh vegetables and this thing squeezed the fresh vegetables and fresh juice juice came out. And it turns out that the bag was just filled with juice.

• 1:09:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so No, no, I think the bag was filled with shaved vegetables or whatever, but you could squeeze the bag.

• 1:09:11David Friedberg?

  You could squeeze it.

• 1:09:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who did it was squeeze the bag?

• 1:09:13David Friedberg?

  So that it was already pre-juiced is what, you know, Olivia Zalewski, who's now Olivia Peterson. It was, she basically put, she, she, she kind of made a whole video and put it on Bloomberg. They had juice in these packets and they were selling people what they thought were like fresh. Yeah.

• 1:09:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So they could have opened the jar. Sorry, sorry. Or they could have put it into a machine and paid seven dollars. They squeezed the juice, then took that juice, put it in a bag.

• 1:09:37David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That was supposed to be fresh vegetables. And then sold that as fresh vegetables to then get juiced.

• 1:09:42David Friedberg?

  To get juiced. And they charged eight dollars a bag for this stuff. And

• 1:09:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who invested in that? Who invested in that? Who wrote the hundred million dollars into that?

• 1:09:50David Friedberg?

  Google Ventures. Anyway, a lot of people invested in this thing. It was a huge, it was a huge like, you know, better for the planet story, but it turns out that the hardware didn't work and then they ended up kind of faking it till you make it. It was very similar to Theranos in the sense that there was a piece of hardware that made a claim that wasn't necessarily true. And granted, no lives were at risk in this particular case, but some might argue lives were at risk in the case of Juul. But I think, you know, you see this a lot more in these kind of hardware, particularly in life sciences companies. You know, there's a business like, like Zymogen's a good example, right? It's very hard tech, very deep tech. Josh Hoffman did an incredible job fundraising, raised a $400 million round from SoftBank, took the company public. Then they go public and a few weeks later, they're like, oh, wait, sorry, we don't actually have any product or any revenue.

• 1:10:35David Friedberg?

  And we talked about this a few months ago, a few weeks ago, and the stock completely collapsed. There's another company called Berkeley Lights, which went public. And yesterday, Scorpion Capital, one of these short sellers, put out a 160-page report on these guys, showing that Berkeley Lights' product, actually it's a, it's a hardware, life sciences hardware that costs $2 million. They've sold it into all the pharma companies. And Scorpion's saying, look, this thing doesn't work. It's a total fraud. Like there's no, the, the machine doesn't do what they claim it does.

• 1:11:03Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, but so to Alan Powell's point, is there a double standard or not?

• 1:11:07David Friedberg?

  Right, and so these were all run by male CEOs and nothing happened to them. And, um,

• 1:11:12Jason Calacanis?

  Are they all white as well?

• 1:11:14David Friedberg?

  Um, yeah, yeah, they're all white.

• 1:11:17Jason Calacanis?

  All right. First of all, let's take it easy on the white guys, Chamath.

• 1:11:22Jason Calacanis?

  It's three other white guys on the pod here.

• 1:11:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, I'm asking a qualifying question.

• 1:11:26Jason Calacanis?

  It is. Um, so here's what I'll ask is,

• 1:11:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, is this a surprise that white dudes will get a hall pass? I don't think that's a shock.

• 1:11:32David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's considered entrepreneurial failure, but when it comes to the woman that everyone I think was excited about seeing succeed because she was a woman, it becomes fraud. And I think Alan,

• 1:11:43Jason Calacanis?

  Well, there's two different things.

• 1:11:44David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:45Jason Calacanis?

  Is it Friedberg? Isn't there two different things between, you know, where she obviously misled people in a premeditated way and lied to them, like taking their blood sample and then putting it in a fake machine, then doing it in the back on an Abbott machine and then bringing the results back and making it on her Theranos Edison machine. I mean, this is literal wire for securities fraud. In these other cases, is it people who are ambitious? If you look at the Juice Row, it's kind of like, this is a stupid idea that got overfunded.

• 1:12:14David Friedberg?

  He put, he put juice in a packet and told you you're not fresh vegetables.

• 1:12:18Jason Calacanis?

  He put chef shaved vegetables in the packet and then used hydraulics, which is an actual real thing.

• 1:12:23David Friedberg?

  That's actually not correct. Watch the video that Olivia put on Bloomberg a few years ago, which destroyed the company.

• 1:12:28Jason Calacanis?

  Pictures of it. I mean, maybe there's a different one.

• 1:12:30David Friedberg?

  No, what they showed is that it was already squeezed. Yes, there was shavings in there, but it was already squeezed.

• 1:12:35Jason Calacanis?

  All right, well, that guy should go to jail. Take it all back.

• 1:12:38David Friedberg?

  I mean, it was like, it was like a crazy story when this came out and everyone's like, oh my God, like it was a standard, like hardware is really difficult. You know, novel hardware technology is really difficult. So you fake it till you make it. In some cases, you launch a product that doesn't even work. Um, you know, and, and there's just, and this isn't just in hardware. It's also in life sciences. You see this a lot where you, you ship a product.

• 1:12:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would probably say that if, if regulators believe that those CEOs

• 1:13:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tried to commit fraud.

• 1:13:06David Friedberg?

  They would have done charges, right?

• 1:13:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They, maybe they still will. They should follow up with those folks.

• 1:13:10David Friedberg?

  So why do you think they went after Elizabeth Holmes, Chamath? Because it was actually, there was a legal case.

• 1:13:15Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think there's, I think there's one really important, there are two things at play in Theranos, which is different. Number one is the kinds of investors that were involved here are extremely powerful folks, not necessarily, you know, technology capable, but very, very well-known, highly connected people in the establishment. And the second was that they were operating in a regulated market, which has very strict laws. Look, I've tried to build competing products to Theranos for years. I've been pretty public about this. I've tried five or six times. They failed every single time. I couldn't even get out of the starting line. You know, these tests

• 1:13:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  would never work without, with a single drop of blood. It just didn't make any sense. The only version of this problem that has been solved well is the ability to detect cell-free cancer DNA in blood, right? Using a very small quantum of blood. Companies like Gardent and Grail have actually done and built a great business out of it. But it requires extremely sophisticated machinery sold to them by Illumina and others. So if you're operating in a regulated market, the bar is higher. There is a lot more scrutiny. And then on top of that, I think she compounded it by including folks and raising capital from folks that may not have actually known and been able to diligence. And so that's the cycle of fraud that may or may not have

• 1:14:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  occurred there. And she has to, or they have, there's a burden to prove that. It's very different, I think, over here in an unregulated market where you can just kind of build whatever you want. And if smart investors, look, Nick just put in the group chat. So the investors in Juicero were Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Thrive Capital, I mean, these are all very sophisticated folks that, you know, made a decision and, you know, it's probably not the case that they were lied to.

• 1:15:09Jason Calacanis?

  I understand why they made the Juicero mistake because at the time, fresh pressed juice using hydraulics was a thing. And this guy said, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to use hydraulics. I'm going to squeeze the vegetable. So you get the best stuff out of it. I understand why they fell for it because my wife was buying that press-

• 1:15:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What the fuck are you talking about?

• 1:15:25Jason Calacanis?

  My wife, Jay, was buying that press Juicery juice in LA. You remember this trend?

• 1:15:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's pure sugar. That stuff is pure sugar.

• 1:15:31Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's vegetable juice too, but it would cost like $11 because they would use so much vegetables. And I saw these presses they used. It's incredibly inefficient, but the juice tastes really great. But the thing I have a problem with Ellen Pao's story is she brings up, you know, the harassment stuff and, you know, this is an issue of gender, etc. But on this week in startups, I've been covering fraud after fraud. I don't know if you saw App Annie got an SEC fine yesterday.

• 1:15:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What happened, Jason? Because I saw you-

• 1:16:00Jason Calacanis?

  With App Annie, they told people who were using their analytics products, building apps, there's like 8 million people, that they would never sell their data except in aggregate. And then they went to Wall Street people and said, here's actually, we'll sell you the data and you can trade on it. And so, yeah, yeah. So I don't think that's like insider trading exactly, but it might be. But anyway, the guy got fined 10 million.

• 1:16:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's like, that's the whole point of, that's the whole point of Reg FD. The whole point is if somebody knows something, if you're a financial actor, Jason, and you know something. So like, if all of us were sitting around a table, you know, and somebody said something about a random public company.

• 1:16:35Jason Calacanis?

  That's not public information.

• 1:16:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If that's not known, two things have to happen. Number one is I, when I receive it, must not do anything with it. And that second, that person who disclosed it needs to then file an 8K and say, whoops, I accidentally said this.

• 1:16:52Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:16:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So there's, if this is an end around, around things like Reg FD, I think that's a really big deal.

• 1:16:57Jason Calacanis?

  Well, and then I guess the question is like, what happens with people who use Planet Labs or whatever to, you know, to satellite images of the target parking lot or put people as spotters outside of Starbucks and count the people- Coming in and out. Is that public information?

• 1:17:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's public. But if you have a terms of service that says one thing.

• 1:17:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:17:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you're violating that, but then you may also be violating Reg FD.

• 1:17:16Jason Calacanis?

  So they haven't gone after people for, on the other side of the trade for securities fraud, but they charged him with securities fraud. He pays 10 million bucks. I think he's in the penalty box, can't be, you know, run up, be a public officer for three years. Then we had Headspin, I don't know if you saw that SaaS company, but Headspin was involved in just basically straight up lying about their SaaS software. Then you have Tether, the stablecoin, they've been banned from New York by the DOJ. They've been banned by the Canadian regulators for the first two crypto exchanges there. And supposedly the DOJ is investigating them. And then there's about five ICOs in New York that have been prosecuted already. So I know Ellen's saying like, they're not prosecuting men, but I'm seeing them all the time. Yeah, they're just not, the press is not obsessed with them because, let's face it, Elizabeth Holmes was.

• 1:18:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Elizabeth Holmes, yeah.

• 1:18:02Jason Calacanis?

  She was weird. I mean, The Voice, there's a lot of peculiar things about her that you don't see in other folks who are boring, right?

• 1:18:10David Friedberg?

  By the way, what you just said is, was part of the sexist claim that Ellen made, which is that we talked about her dress and how she dressed and how she talked. We don't talk about that kind of stuff when it comes to other entrepreneurs and that.

• 1:18:21Jason Calacanis?

  Of course they did. Adam Newman, they were talking about him being a hippie, walking around with bare feet, being 6'7". Every profile, she's, she's wrong in that case. Every profile of Adam Newman talked about his personal life and his wife is married to, what's her name's?

• 1:18:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, Gwyneth Paltrow's cousin.

• 1:18:37Jason Calacanis?

  Gwyneth Paltrow. So Ellen's 100% wrong on that one.

• 1:18:39David Sacks?

  Yeah. And did it, didn't Elizabeth Holmes make it relevant by dressing deliberately styling herself in the fashion of Steve Jobs with the black turtleneck and the glasses? I mean, you know, she, she portrayed herself as the next Steve Jobs. I mean, it was part of the grift. So now, yeah, exactly. Now, did gender play into it? Yeah, but I think not necessarily in the way that Ellen Powell thinks, in this sense that the media wanted to believe so badly that the next Steve Jobs was going to be a woman, that they kind of looked past what should have been staring them in the face. I mean, look, if a man had gotten out there wearing the black turtleneck and the John Lennon glasses or whatever, they would have said, who is this clown?

• 1:19:19Jason Calacanis?

  Moron.

• 1:19:20David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. But they suspended.

• 1:19:23Jason Calacanis?

  Free Bird, you have to dress up as Steve Jobs in the next episode of Free Bird. You can make a work.

• 1:19:28David Friedberg?

  Can we all do it? Can we see who's best?

• 1:19:29Jason Calacanis?

  Let's do a Halloween episode where we all show up. I'll do Elizabeth Holmes for Halloween episode.

• 1:19:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But no, but that's like a nested Steve Jobs. So like you're going to be Elizabeth Holmes as Steve Jobs.

• 1:19:38Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, Elizabeth as Steve Jobs.

• 1:19:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think Sax, you're entirely right. I think you're right.

• 1:19:43David Sacks?

  I think this is the way that gender has played into it is that there's a lot of people who really wanted the Elizabeth Holmes story to be true. And frankly, she used that.

• 1:19:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53David Sacks?

  In order to perpetuate her fraud.

• 1:19:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, she may not have used it, but she was definitely influenced.

• 1:19:56David Sacks?

  Or she benefited from it.

• 1:19:57Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, she used it. She definitely used it.

• 1:19:59David Friedberg?

  I want to ask you guys kind of a controversial question. You know, because this story made me think a lot about some of what's gone on in businesses that I know of and where I know that there is to some degree fraud and misrepresentation happening by the CEO and founder. And this is a little known secret in Silicon Valley or a little spoken of secret, which is that, you know, more often than not, if you know about fraud at a company in Silicon Valley, you're encouraged to keep your mouth shut because the idea is at the end of the day, if they're gaining lots of capital and, you know, more capital floats all boats and more money will rush into that market. And so if there's businesses that you're competing with that are committing fraud, rather than raise your hand, which then people say, hey, look, if you're going to raise

• 1:20:41David Friedberg?

  your hand and claim fraud and talk negatively about another company, people are going to start doing that about you and they're going to start doing that about your portfolio. And so you guys know this, right? Like you're discouraged from calling out these sorts of moments when you see them in Silicon Valley because there is the perceived kind of look, we're all in a club together. We're all in it together. We got to be careful not to talk smack because then capital will stop coming in, people will come after you and we're much more of kind of a supportive, open community.

• 1:21:07Jason Calacanis?

  Have you guys experienced that, Chav?

• 1:21:10David Friedberg?

  I have with at least two companies in the last year. And, you know, I've kept my mouth shut because, and by the way, I don't think that there's necessarily harm going on, but I know of misrepresentation, but the investors are like, look, we'd love to see these guys succeed because that would be good for you in this way because then you would, there'd be more money flowing in and yada, yada. And there's always a narrative around why you don't want to do this, you know, why you don't want to call these things out.

• 1:21:29David Sacks?

  I called it out and I've still got a crazy founder denouncing me years later. I mean, look, I hate.

• 1:21:34Jason Calacanis?

  Who has an SEC enforcement against him?

• 1:21:36David Sacks?

  Yeah, exactly. A sanction. So, yeah, I mean, look, I, you're right, Friedberg, that there's very little upshot to doing it. But, but look, I hate, but we have to distinguish between fraud and sort of puffing, okay? Here's the thing that I think, you know, Ellen Powell's kind of missing is when she criticizes all these founders who are visionary and evangelical and promoting something that ends up not working, that is not fraud. I mean, every startup, we ask the founder, how are you going to change the world? What is your big idea? What is the big dream? And then they lay out this really pretty unrealistic set of things, unrealistic in the sense that it comes true maybe one out of a thousand

• 1:22:18David Sacks?

  times, right? Every startup, their founding mission is a bit of an overpromise. And just because it doesn't come true, doesn't make it fraud. I think that a lot of people out in the non-Silicon Valley investing world would interpret that as fraud, because a founder told them something that ends up not happening, not ends up being true.

• 1:22:37Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent correct.

• 1:22:38David Sacks?

  And this is why you really, it's very dangerous to take money outside of Silicon Valley, because people don't really understand this distinction, okay? Just because it doesn't work out and what you said ended up not being true, does not make it fraud. What is fraud is when you lie about, like I said before, when you lie about the past. And what Elizabeth Holmes is accused of doing by these prosecutors is, again, lying about the present day capabilities of her product and actually falsifying documents. She actually falsified documents. That is the fraud. That is the line you cannot cross.

• 1:23:07Jason Calacanis?

  They changed blood test results. Listen, said another way, Sax, Elizabeth Holmes' vision of taking less blood and letting, and doing more tests with it and being more efficient is a completely valid thing to pursue. Chamath just said he pursued it five times and failed five times.

• 1:23:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Completely failed.

• 1:23:22Jason Calacanis?

  Her lying, completely failed. Tens of millions of dollars burned in a pile. But what we all buy into here is what if it does work one in a thousand times? What Elizabeth Holmes did was she lied about the results. And she, not only did she lie about the results, she lied about real people's blood test results, like actual civilians.

• 1:23:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, I have some empathy for Elizabeth Jobs in the following way. When I was told, when I was told, when I was told...

• 1:23:48Jason Calacanis?

  You mean Steve Holmes?

• 1:23:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, hold on. When I was told, I think I told this story. I was asking an investor, hey, what's the hottest company around? This is in, you know, 2013 or 14. He said Theranos.

• 1:24:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And there was no way to get connected to the company. So then I was like, you know, I had heard just the bullet point, one drop of blood, full characterization of your, you know, be able to do a blood test, et cetera. I thought this is an incredible idea. But because I had no way of getting connected. Now, thank God that turned out to be a good thing. I was like, well, fuck it. I'll just start my own version. I'll figure out how to do this. And, and Jason, as you said, it turned out to be much, much harder than I thought. And five different iterations, five different teams and, you know, PhDs from MIT, Stanford, everything. We couldn't, Caltech, we couldn't figure it out. So it's not wrong to want to believe that something is possible. And it's not illegal to do that.

• 1:24:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Uh, but as David said, the minute that you try to, you tell lies about the past in order to basically then change the future in a way that shouldn't happen. That's real, that's really unfair.

• 1:24:51Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's, uh, what do you think of the defense that Balwani, uh, the Svengali defense? I saw Kara Swisher and some New York Times reporters and other reporters were basically not buying it. Um,

• 1:25:08David Friedberg?

  But we talked about this last time, didn't we?

• 1:25:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Yeah. I'm just curious if you're have been following the trial.

• 1:25:13David Sacks?

  I, I, I think it's hard for somebody who in the moment took credit for every decision, for every piece of press, for claim to be the Jobsian micromanager to all of a sudden now turn around and say, no, that wasn't me making the decisions. I was under the spell of somebody else. I think that's a tough argument to make.

• 1:25:32Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Also, I think, uh, you know, this is going to come out, but she actually fired Balwani. So if she fired him, how was she? You know, it's harder to do the Svengali defense, I think, um.

• 1:25:44David Sacks?

  Well, maybe they're both guilty.

• 1:25:46Jason Calacanis?

  Svengali.

• 1:25:47David Sacks?

  Maybe they're both guilty. It could be an and, not an or.

• 1:25:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Svengali, Sven, Svengali.

• 1:25:51Jason Calacanis?

  Svengali. All right. Listen, we'll close on this. Mailchimp has sold to Intuit for $12 billion in the largest bootstrapped acquisition ever. Uh, we all know Mailchimp, uh, and we all know QuickBooks. It's a huge deal.

• 1:26:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have one issue with this, and I don't know if it's true or not, but apparently none of the employees have any equity.

• 1:26:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and that was what I was about to get to. Employees didn't have equity. However, and I've known MailChimp for a while, for over a decade, been using the product, I know the founder had him on the podcast before.

• 1:26:21David Friedberg?

  Have they been a sponsor of your pod?

• 1:26:23Jason Calacanis?

  They sponsored in the first year, I think, or two, and-

• 1:26:27David Sacks?

  Were you an angel investor?

• 1:26:28Jason Calacanis?

  I was not. I tried to be, and he said, "We're never gonna ever raise money." And-

• 1:26:32David Friedberg?

  He also apparently said he was never, ever gonna sell.

• 1:26:35Jason Calacanis?

  And he was also never gonna sell. I, they gave-

• 1:26:38David Sacks?

  He had 12 billion reasons to change his mind.

• 1:26:40Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly. They gave him the 20%. My understanding was employees got a 20% cash bonus, and they were amongst the highest paid, you know, in the industry. So their plan was, instead of giving people some big reward at the end-

• 1:26:56David Friedberg?

  They were just distributing cash, basically.

• 1:26:57Jason Calacanis?

  They were just distributing cash. So if you had 100, if you were 150K developer, you got 30K on top.

• 1:27:02David Friedberg?

  That's not an unreasonable way to run a business that has no outside investors, that, you know, and employees know that going in. They didn't go in with the expectation of equity. They went in with the expectation of a high salary and a big bonus, and they got it.

• 1:27:14Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I do that in a few companies, few companies that I own, I do that. But what I also do is I let them buy into the company every year.

• 1:27:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just think that it's a good principle to have like an ownership in the business. I think you should be paying a lot of money, and we should pay cash bonuses for achieving results. We do that. But then what we also say is, "If you want to buy equity, come and buy it."

• 1:27:34David Friedberg?

  But you're probably right from a performance perspective, Chamath, that I don't think it's necessarily a moral obligation to do that, right? How this guy wants to run his business, up to him, you know?

• 1:27:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Up to him, and people made the choice.

• 1:27:43Jason Calacanis?

  People voted.

• 1:27:43David Friedberg?

  Yeah. I mean, people that work at your house, you don't give them equity in your house, right? I mean, you own the house, you give them cash.

• 1:27:49Jason Calacanis?

  Or people who play for a basketball team are not allowed to get equity in the team, but in other countries, right? I think in soccer, you can.

• 1:27:55David Sacks?

  Yes, but I think one of the best things about Silicon Valley is the fact that there's a, there's a practice of giving broad-based options to everybody in the company, and there's all those great stories about the chef at Google who got rich, and the secretaries at Microsoft who got rich, and that is a beautiful thing about the tech ecosystem.

• 1:28:12David Friedberg?

  It's beautiful. It's wonderful.

• 1:28:13David Sacks?

  And you never, and you never hear about that when all the press is doing is writing stories about greedy VCs and all that kind of stuff. They, they talk about VC, but they don't bring up the point that in these non-VC companies, the employees never end up with anything.

• 1:28:26David Friedberg?

  Someone who came from nothing can afford a beautiful home and have their life taken care of forever because they work really hard at a great company they worked at. And that's the most common story and it's never reported, but.

• 1:28:37David Sacks?

  Yeah. And by the way, look, there's, there's nothing wrong with bootstrapping your company. So congrats to this Mailchimp founder for doing it. I mean, certainly, you know, like as a investor, I have no desire.

• 1:28:47David Friedberg?

  Describe what, yeah, just explain what bootstrapping is, Sax.

• 1:28:50David Sacks?

  Bootstrapping is just when you don't raise outside money and he did it himself and he basically

• 1:28:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Funded with profits.

• 1:28:55David Sacks?

  Yeah, he funded the company with the profits, which is just amazing. But, but, but here, here's the thing about that is, uh, he did this, he started the company back in 2001 at the nadir after the dot com crash and there was very little money going into new starts back then. And he managed to create this. So kudos to him, but the environment now is very different. If you look at the amount of funding that goes into startups, I mean, it's now in the hundreds of billions every year. And so if you have this mentality of I'm going to bootstrap it, you're, you're probably going to lose to a competitor who's simply willing to raise money and pursue that same idea with more funding. Now, look, I'm not in the business of pushing money on people who don't want it. I'm just saying realistically, the times are different now. If you can bootstrap a business, great, go for it. But I do think that if you're in competition with someone who can raise VC money, you're going to be at disadvantage.

• 1:29:40David Friedberg?

  Hard to compete yourself.

• 1:29:42David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What about AOC, what she wore to the Met Gala?

• 1:29:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tax the rich. She wore, she wore a tax the rich dress to the Met Gala.

• 1:29:51David Sacks?

  Dave Portnoy, Dave Portnoy had the best tweet about this, which is she's about to go have the best night of her life, partying her ass off with all these rich people and she's wearing this tax, the tax of rich. It's total hypocrisy. Uh, this is classic socialism where they do this, uh, virtue signaling while being friends and hanging out with the, the people, the owners of capital they're purporting to deride. And frankly, it's just like the mass things. I mean, you've got the servant class working at the Met Gala, wearing masks, uh, while every, while all the, uh, guests of the, the gala are, don't have to wear a mask. I mean,

• 1:30:25David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's like Newsom all over again.

• 1:30:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, she, she, uh, she also drops a merch. You can buy a tax the rich. There's an official AOC team shop.

• 1:30:32David Friedberg?

  I can't believe that that's true. That's what makes it the most lolsome. She goes to the thing and now she's selling $58 sweaters, sweatshirts.

• 1:30:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  A $58 sweatshirt, a $28 dad hat, a $10 sticker pack, $27 tote bag,

• 1:30:46David Friedberg?

  Whoa, whoa, what's a dad hat?

• 1:30:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  A $27 mug. It's like a hat for dads, like for us, you know?

• 1:30:52Jason Calacanis?

  Oh yeah, Tax the Rich Dad hat.

• 1:30:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tax the Rich, yeah.

• 1:30:54Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, I didn't know dad hat was a category. I know dad jokes and dad bods. I've never saw dad hat.

• 1:30:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Dad hat.

• 1:30:59Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic, fantastic. Yeah, I thought it was kinda gross.

• 1:31:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is it wrong to buy some of this? I think that it's kinda cool, actually.

• 1:31:07Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, the Tax the Rich hat is pretty funny.

• 1:31:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's pretty cool.

• 1:31:10Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my god, if you wore a Tax the Rich-

• 1:31:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Sweatshirt, I think the best thing is if I bought this sweatshirt and wore it around.

• 1:31:16Jason Calacanis?

  Wear it on CNBC, do it on your next seat. If you wear a Tax the Rich hat on CNBC, that would be peak Chamath. I think that would be peak.

• 1:31:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That'd be great.

• 1:31:26Jason Calacanis?

  Get it signed by, uh, alright, anybody got any plugs? Anybody have plugs?

• 1:31:30David Sacks?

  The craziest thing about that Dave Portnoy tweet was that it got fact-checked. Can you believe that? It got fact-checked. I mean, it was just mind-blowing that this is what-

• 1:31:40Jason Calacanis?

  When you say fact-checked, they put a fact-checking warning on it.

• 1:31:42David Sacks?

  They put a warning label on it.

• 1:31:43Jason Calacanis?

  Oh god.

• 1:31:44David Sacks?

  So in other words-

• 1:31:45Jason Calacanis?

  Warning, liberals and socialists at Twitter don't agree with this tweet.

• 1:31:50David Sacks?

  Right, no, exactly. Warning, somebody in the out crowd, Dave Portnoy, is criticizing somebody in the in crowd. That, by definition-

• 1:31:58Jason Calacanis?

  Portnoy definitely gets a seat at All-in Summit, right? He definitely gets a seat.

• 1:32:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is the, is the ivermectin fake story, uh, from Rachel Maddow, is that fact-checked or no?

• 1:32:09Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 1:32:09David Sacks?

  She posted some update or other, begrudgingly presenting other information, but, I mean, the story should have been completely retracted and it wasn't.

• 1:32:17Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, no, I'm just curious whether there's a fact-checked double standard.

• 1:32:19David Sacks?

  No, there's, oh absolutely, there is no fact-check on that. For some reason, the Rachel Maddow tweets went un-fact-checked. As far as I know, they're still un-fact-checked.

• 1:32:28Jason Calacanis?

  You know what? You should wear the, get the Rich hat and then get your Buy the Hamptons, uh, shirt. Then wear those on your next CNBC.

• 1:32:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What a great combo.

• 1:32:38Jason Calacanis?

  Tax the Rich.

• 1:32:39David Sacks?

  Wait, can I show you guys, can I show you guys a great piece of merch? Hold on, I'll be back in a sec.

• 1:32:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, but I, but can I just say, I don't look good in hats.

• 1:32:45Jason Calacanis?

  It's merch for the beep app.

• 1:32:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I don't, I don't look good in hats.

• 1:32:50Jason Calacanis?

  No, you don't.

• 1:32:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No.

• 1:32:51Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 1:32:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I've wanted to wear a hat for a long time, but I just, it just doesn't look good on me.

• 1:32:55Jason Calacanis?

  Let's see his-

• 1:32:56David Sacks?

  This is my favorite piece of merch.

• 1:32:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Merch.

• 1:32:59David Sacks?

  Which is somebody made.

• 1:33:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, besties.

• 1:33:01Jason Calacanis?

  Like friends.

• 1:33:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Like friends. That's fabulous.

• 1:33:04Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely great.

• 1:33:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Wait, can we just say, by the way, there's a person that did make a besties merch site? None of us knows who he is, but there's an incredible thing that he tweeted at us, right? J Cal, which is he's paying his way through college?

• 1:33:15Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he puts a note into it. He, he told me he made like five grand over the summer. And so, you know, he's probably making like 30 grand a year off of merch.

• 1:33:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you're any, anybody's interested in some besties merch, we don't make a single dime from it, but there's a young, hardworking dude paying him, paying his way through school.

• 1:33:30Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. It's a bestie apparel. He's bestie apparel, right?

• 1:33:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Bestie apparel.

• 1:33:34Jason Calacanis?

  bestiesapparel.com. We don't really want to encourage too many people to go crazy doing this, but this is our guy, I guess. And, uh,

• 1:33:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I mean, good for him. He's paying his way through school.

• 1:33:43Jason Calacanis?

  Good for him. Yeah. And I think they did, um, you know, the, they, the shirts that people wore on their all in bar crawl came from that. Uh, but I really want to do the, I want to do the all in summer.

• 1:33:53Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tax the rich. I'm buying this tax the rich sweatshirt, boys, and the T-shirt and the sticker pack. I'm going for all of it. You got me, AOC. You got me on the hook.

• 1:34:01Jason Calacanis?

  Do they have a, a men's bikini, uh, with tax the rich on the backside? For you? For when we're in Italy?

• 1:34:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I would buy that.

• 1:34:07Jason Calacanis?

  We could, how about we get matching Speedos?

• 1:34:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  She won't let me.

• 1:34:10Jason Calacanis?

  Do our walk.

• 1:34:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I always threaten to buy a Speedo. She always says, well,

• 1:34:14Jason Calacanis?

  We have to buy Speedos next time we're in Italy.

• 1:34:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  She won't let me.

• 1:34:16Jason Calacanis?

  And we have to do our bestie walk from pier to pier on the beaches of Italy in a Speedo. Can you imagine if that image got leaked of us in Speedos?

• 1:34:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I did, I did a bestie walk with Saks. All right, boys, I gotta go. I gotta eat lunch.

• 1:34:28Jason Calacanis?

  She was, all right. Love you, besties.

• 1:34:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Love you, guys. Take care.

• 1:34:52Speaker 04

  Besties are gone. That is my dog, can you get a hold of it in your driveway?

• 1:35:00Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 1:35:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big, huge orgy, because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

• 1:35:11Speaker 04

  What, you're the beef? What, you're the beef? Beef? What? Where did you get merch? Besties are gone.